Category Archives: Android

Samsung did not announce the S9 at CES 2018 – there were some rumours that it would be announced then but that did not happen. Well now we have confirmation from the Samsung US news website that the next Samsung Galaxy S9 will be launched at MWC 2018 on February 25th 2018 at 10:30 PM IST.

From the brief release it seems like they have focused on the S9’s camera and are aiming to improve that significantly and it may feature HDR video capture.

The best part about owing a Smart TV is that you can play back locally stored content like photos, movies, home videos wirelessly on the large screen without moving a muscle. But sometimes the implementation isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Modern Smart TVs support technologies like DLNA and Miracast, and most newer phones can take advantage of these. All you need to do is install an app. While Android has a few more choices for DLNA apps that act as servers, the choice is slightly more limited on iOS. Most people just give in and buy an Apple TV. But you don’t necessarily need to do that if mirroring your iOS device isn’t the intention, but playing back photos, video and audio is.

A major annoyance when to move away from the iPhone is that you suddenly stop receiving messages. This happens because your friends’ iOS devices think that you still use an iPhone, so regular text messages are sent as iMessages, and thus never delivered.

Data caps are a real thing now and the concept of unlimited data is a thing of the past. While manufacturers have realised this and implemented settings that restrict downloads/streaming to WIFI, there still exists room for improvement.

Fortunately for Android users (at least ones on the newer versions) Google has added a setting where you can tell the device that the ‘WIFI’ connection you’re on is actually a portable hotspot, so it shouldn’t go crazy downloading Play Store updates or anything else that will consume copious amounts of data.

We’ve seen Open Mobile’s implementation of brining Android apps to Tizen before, but that method involves deployment on a platform level. The Open Mobile code needs to be a part of the Tizen code before the Android apps can be run on Tizen. Infraware, the company behind the Polaris App Player has a different approach.

The way this works in that they have a solution called PAG (Polaris App Generator) that lets the developer upload an Android app (APK) and it converts it into a TPK file that can be installed on the Tizen device. Then to run this modified TPK, you need to have the PAP (Polaris App Player) installed on the phone. Once that’s present, the modified TPK that you just installed will launch inside the PAP, and behave like a native Tizen app.

The company is giving away the Polaris App Player to users for free, in the hope that developers will use their service to deploy their Android apps to Tizen, thus making them money. While I have my doubts about Android Apps ‘officially’ being supported on Tizen, Infraware has a chance of succeeding as they don’t need to be a part of the platform, and have a business model as long as the developers and users are on board. Here is a video of the implementation in action:

While there is a noticeable slow down while running high performance games, most apps should run fine. Although, there will always be the issue of not all UI elements working properly because the app was originally made for Android in mind. The current implementation is based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, so that means none of the ICS and up only apps, will be available. According to the company, PAG can port 80~90% of Android apps to Tizen app without re-compiling. Some examples include games such as Angrybird series, Counter Terrorist, Treasure Detective, Fruit Slice, Drag Racing, Shut Bubble Deluxe, Cut the Rope Free, Air Hockey etc.

One of the nicer features of the HTC One is its ability to create Video Highlights. Highlights are nothing but 30 second videos created from the pictures, Zoes and videos that you have shot on the HTC One. By default, a video highlight is created for each ‘Event’, and the HTC One automatically creates events based on the geo-tags of the photos and videos. But if you want to merge events, there’s also an option to do that, so you can have a single event spanning a week, which includes all your holiday photos.

I love these video highlights, they look great, have great animations and the best part is that they are automatic. If you don’t like the highlight that’s been created, just hit shuffle and the One creates another one. You can also choose from a bunch of themes. The result is videos like this or this.

Fortunately, you can use the HTC One to create Highlights from pictures and video that you have taken from other devices as well. For example, I created a Highlight from photos that I have taken from an iPhone in 2012. For good measure I also threw in a video taken on a Nokia N8. Here’s how:

Attach your HTC One to the computer in the ‘Mass Storage’ mode. (I’ve used AirDroid to connect wirelessly).

Navigate to the Pictures folder on the phone, and create a Folder. Name it whatever you want the name of the event to be. Copy the photos and videos into it. Note that only .mp4 files are supported. The Gallery doesn’t see .mov files.

On the phone, the photos and video will show up as an ‘Event’ in the Gallery app.

Open the event and the video highlights will be waiting for you. If you like what you see, you can directly share to HTC Share, YouTube or any other destination that you may like. If not, hit the shuffle button, play around with the themes etc. You can also save the video to the phone without sharing it to an online service. An average video highlight is 1280 x 720 and weighs in at 12-14 MB in size.